[jdev] Re: Fwd: Re: Lan chat

[Tijl Houtbeckers]

On Sat, 01 Oct 2005 02:05:10 +0200, mame louk <mamelouk at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi there,
> All these messages make me feel a little oppressed.

What are you talking about? All the messages have been mostly about the  
technical side of implementing things.
>
> Did you ever used a LAN chat app ?
> You run it, et voilà. You don't have to give a user name (even if you
> don't connect to a server), you don't need to have contacts- you can
> see all connected people on the LAN, there is a main chat room, you
> can leave a persistent message on a messageboard... Try BorgChat (only
> for windows), you will have my point of view.

You can build exactly the same with Jabber/Zeroconf, so I don't see your  
problem.
Presumable you do ask the user to set a username.. (though I suppose you  
could use the system name or something)

>
> Unfortunately, I can't try iChat nor Adium because I don't use a Mac.
> Trillian and google talk can do this, but they are not open source, so
> I want to pay my tribute to the community with an open source lan
> dedicated chat app.

Google Talk can do this? You sure?
Anyway, people pointed to Miranda IM, which is open source. (Windows only  
though)

> I just wanted to know if there's a standard part of jabber that was
> made for this kind of software. That's all. Never mind.

The protocol is not documented quite that officially yet, but feel free to  
go ahead with that.

> Thanks for all the explanation & details,
> I tried a python implementation of zeroconf, it's really good.
> The ivy bus was especially designed for delivering messages (using
> regular expressions) in a network to whoever whant them, so you don't
> have to discover and memorize peers  (I'm referring to zeroconf as I
> understood it).

Ivybus does all this "underwater" too, but it's much more highlevel. You  
can do the same with zeroconf, just need to build an application/protocol  
layer on top of it. Jabber wouldn't be half bad for that. The problem  
using Ivybus & Jabber together is they'll have somewhat overlapping  
mechanisms. Of course, Ivybus is very robust (I believe it was developed  
for Airtraffic control originally?) and you don't quickly replicate all  
the work they've done. Then again we're chatting to people on a LAN, not  
trying to land aircraft full of people..